September 30, 2008

Without traffic from search engines (both large and small) you will be very limited in your chances for success of any magnitude. Pay-Per-Click can be effective after you learn the ropes. Just be sure to limit how much you can lose. To get traffic from search engines, you will need page rank (where your organic-free ad appears when someone enters one of your keywords in a search box). In order to get your website to rank high enough that search engines give you decent position for your organic ads- you need to work on two aspects of your website. The content (words) on your home page which contain your keywords, and back links pointing back to your website. A back link is your URL in the content of another website. It could be a one-way link in a directory, or an ad with your link you have paid to place on another website, or it could be a free classified ad on a website, or it could be your URL on a discussion forum, or in an article you have written that has been published.

Keywords on your home page should be repeated maybe 3 to 5 times with the main keyword being repeated maybe 10 to 14 times. Your keywords should be included in well structured sentences and paragraphs. Try to get authority links to your website. Authority links are links to websites that offer the same type services and products that your website offers. These types of links will build your page ranking with the search engines much faster. Place your paid ads on high traffic directories that specialize in listing the same type services or products that you offer. Do a search for one-way free directory links and get a list of these directories and submit your URL to a few dozen of them. This should help your page ranking.

When I optimize my website to get a good page ranking, I figure that page content (keywords on home page) account for about 20% of page rank, and back links to authority websites account for 70% of page rank, and one way links to general directories and forums accounts for about 10 % toward a favorable page ranking. Keep in mind that it can take from 60 to 90 days for links of all types to become effective as a factor in search engine ranking.

Thanks to the internet, when we talk about making money online, we do not only talk about the big players. Fact is, there are more small businesses online than the bigger ones. The power of the internet has allowed greater competition and has allowed even smaller businesses to earn income online. One way you can make money online is by creating your own website. Building a profitable website is a four-step process.

The first thing you need is a domain. This is basically the name of your website. If you have a preferred domain name, you can check a domain name registrar and see if the name you want is still available. If it isn’t, some domain registration services will give you suggested names. You will also need to have a hosting service in order for your site to be viewed on the internet.

The process of optimizing your website so that it will rank high on search engines such as Google and Yahoo is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO is important because 80% of traffic going to your site is through search engines. Aside from this, traffic from search engines is free so capitalizing on SEO is one of the best tactics used by most website owners today in order to get a return on investment at a reasonable time.

Search engines rank the importance of websites through the number of websites which are linking to your site. Another method is through the keyword density (number of times keywords are repeated) of the content found on your website. Most SEO experts believe that you need to place meta tags (keywords and phrases placed in the first part of your page code) on the pages of your website in order to help search engines understand what the page is about. Also, there shouldn’t be more than 25 keywords per page. It is important that keywords are repeated in the page content as many times as possible, but don’t overdo it because some search engines can already detect faked content.

The last thing you need to do in order for your website to become profitable is by promoting it. You can submit your site to search engines and website directories. You can also buy links or create valuable back links through articles. There are article submission services that will submit your article to hundreds of ezines and article directories. In the internet world, just like the real world, you need to make sure that your site gets as much exposure as possible. Remember that the more visitors you have for your site, the greater chances you have of making a sale. Keywords: your home page, search engines, back link, back links, authority links, your website, free directory links, page ranking, make money online, making money online, domain name, optimizing your website, page rank

John Smalley of Smalley Web Solutions is a team of four people with skills in marketing, website design, and programming. Our website design fees are among the lowest in our industry. We offer free web hosting and domain name registration for one year to all of our clients. Contact Smalley Web Solutions at http://www.webwizardonline.net or jfsmalley@clearwire.net.